Story By: FlamingRedBatwings (dont like, dont read)
by The One True Nobody
Summary: In a mythical world where things happen twenty years late, and magic doesn't stop computers from being a thing at Hogwarts, Harry's sudden spike in celebrity drama gives rise to a disturbing trend among fanfic authors. Warning: You may find fics of someone you know. (One-Shot)


**Disclaimer:** The _Harry Potter_ series and all associated materials belong to their original author and creator, J.K. Rowling. This fan-work is intended neither for profit nor disrespect; rather, it is written in a spirit of fun and creative experimentation. No monetary profit is intended from its publication, and it is assumed that all readers have already experienced the story from which it is derived through legal means that support _Harry Potter_ and its author/publishers.

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 **Story By: FlamingRedBatwings (dont like, dont read)  
** \- a _Harry Potter_ one-shot -  
by  
The One True Nobody

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Let me tell you a story of a boy named Potter. Not the one you've already been told, but a different Potter. There are many worlds, and in some of them, the rules by which our world is governed may not quite line up with what we know and accept as law in our own. Or even as law in the universe next door, such as the one you've glimpsed in book-form (or perhaps, in movie-form) in our altogether not-very-magical dimension of petty people, pettier people, and questionable political decisions that put the pettiest people in positions of power.

This boy lived in a universe not unlike the one described in those seven books (or seven-and-a-half films), and there were exactly two things different about the workings of this universe. The laws of that specific cosmos did not render Muggle technologies inoperable in heavily-charged magical places, and as a result, Muggleborns and half-blood witches and wizards had made quite a larger impact on the state of affairs in the wizarding world, chiefly by introducing them to Muggle television, films, and the Internet. Time, I should mention, also wasn't quite in-sync. What you might know as the 1990s was, in this layer of the multiverse, the 2010s. By now, not only had witches and wizards had time to appreciate some of the more impressive non-magical advances in pop culture and social networking, they had actually invented magical variants on many of them.

So it should surprise you not at all to picture, in your head, a gathering of fourth-year teenagers grouped around a small table before the fire in the Gryffindor common room. Harry and Hermione both sat with laptops perched on their knees, Harry frantically scrolling through tab after tab of search results on the MagiNet, Hermione unnoticed on an arm-chair off to the side, stairing aghast at whatever it was she had found. Their friend, Ron Weasley, to whom this universe had been slightly kinder (the quantity of freckles upon his face was still noteworthy, but of a less overbearing concentration) had fallen asleep, his old-model mobile phone having slipped from his grasp and flumped to the carpet some minutes before. He had yet to commence his customary snoring.

Harry had to find the answer. The Second Task of the Triwizard Tournament was mere days away! And if there was an answer to be found, it existed somewhere on MagiNet! Unfortunately, the wizarding world hadn't quite mastered the art of programming a search engine, so even a pretty specific search term like _underwater breathing_ had produced a list containing everything from aquatic creature porn to coincidentally-titled Celestina Warbeck songs. At this rate, Harry thought, he might actually have to drag Hermione to the library. Hermione _hated_ the library. "So old-fashioned," she'd sniffed when Harry had expressed his own love of libraries. She didn't know how good she had it, though. Harry had never been allowed a phone, not even an old prepaid one with a low-res screen. When he wanted to read, he had to get an actual book. Hermione was a Kindle enthusiast through and through, however. She didn't even approve of physical textbooks for classes; for the past four terms, she'd taken her entire booklist digitally, which had been a hell of a boon during their second year, that was for certain.

Digital books were great, of course. Hell, the first thing Harry had thought after the Chamber of Secrets fiasco was _I'm buying Ginny a new phone. No one will ever be able to sneak another cursed book into her school things again if she doesn't have any other actual books to hide them in!_

Finally stumbling on a likely-looking _HerboloGeeks_ article titled  Gillyweed: Become a Merman For An Hour! the boy pumped a fist and said "Woot! Hermione, I think we have a winner. Now to see if the magical branch of Amazon sells any."

It was a sad state of affairs, but most shops on Diagon Alley were going out of business. Only Ollivander's, Madam Malkin's, the pet stores, and the ice cream parlor seemed to get any regular business these days. The owner of Amazon had happened to have a wizard for a kid and upon discovering a world of commerce he hadn't known about previously, had made quick work of integrating it into his business model. The days of owl orders were long past! Except for families like the Weasleys, anyway.

But as Harry grinned over at his friend, she quickly snapped her laptop closed and yelled, "GREAT! GOOD! THANK GOODNESS FOR PRIME STUDENT SHIPPING!"

She had not lost the aghast look on her face, and sounded like she didn't know whether to be angry or horrified. Harry stared. She quickly stiffened, and forced a smile.

"Well? Put in your order. We can brainstorm up a plan tomorrow!"

Harry frowned, deeply, and asked, "What's up?"

"I-I just forgot to turn safe-search on, that's all! Goodnight, Harry! Make sure Ronald finds his way to an actual bed."

And she was off, walking as fast as a fast walk could be before it turned into an out-and-out run, to the staircase that led to the girls' dormitory. Harry watched her go, a bemused look on his face, and then set about prodding Ron's shoulder with the old phone's own stylus pen until he snorted awake.

Hermione, safe up the stairs among snoozing young women where no boy could follow without the stairs collapsing into a slide beneath their feet, scurried to her bed and opened her laptop again, fuming at the screen. If it wasn't bad enough that Rita Skeeter was running a smear campaign on MagicMotion, making all kinds of vile videos lying about Harry, now his detractors had taken it a step beyond.

They were writing fan fiction. Worse, it was _horrible_ fan fiction. And that was before she even considered how badly half of them butchered the English language! Who had started this fad of writing stories about a studlike Slytherin version of Harry who'd decided he'd had enough of the Headmaster's scheming and claimed his vast family fortune? ...Had these people even researched pureblood society? Where had they gotten the idea that Harry should properly be rubbing elbows with the likes of the Greengrasses and Notts? Or that he had chiseled abs? Hermione had seen Harry without his shirt on. She hadn't seen a six-pack down there. Heck, she hadn't even seen a two-pack!

Hermione knew she should stop reading, but she couldn't pull herself away from it. This was the fifth story she'd gone as far as opening in a tab to read, and there had been at least twenty others baring the same!Exclamation/marked labels to denote the tropes they conformed to, because why draw your reader in with good writing and unexpected twists when you can just list a pairing and be done with it? This current story had said "what if" about six times in its summary, but still had room to list "Dark!Harry," "Slytherin!Harry," "Smart!Harry," "Harry/Draco," "Ron-bashing," and "Dumbledore-bashing." The last few words were "dont like, dont read." This had prompted Hermione to read it. Her brain had instantly screamed at her: _BUT HOW DO I KNOW IF I DON'T READ IT FIRST?!_

 _And she couldn't look away._ It was only three chapters long. Each chapter consisted of upwards of two-thousand words, barely enough for a small handful of page-flips on an e-reader. The dialogue was all clumped together into a single paragraph, regardless of how many people were talking. The version of Harry in this story had already assembled a small harem, consisting of Daphne Greengrass, Luna Lovegood (whose name was "appropriate"), and Ginny Weasley, by sweeping them off their feet with a musical number in the second chapter... a musical number written in _text_ with a very jarring mid-narration author's note mis-spelling the title of a song Hermione apparently had to listen to if she wanted to know what it was actually supposed to sound like.

And in the third chapter, Harry, a third-year, had somehow managed to emancipate himself from both his abusive Muggle relatives and the meddling clutches of Albus Dumbledore, who had apparently been embezzling the third instance of a family inheritance to rival the Malfoy fortune behind Harry's back, the "small" vault Harry had been given access to being merely a front for the true prize... which contained a will declaring Harry's true legal guardian to be Professor Snape, whose hatred of the boy had apparently sprung from deception, Dumbledore having lied and claimed that his best friend, James Potter, had dropped Snape like a bad habit and chosen Sirius Black instead!

It was when she reached the end of Chapter Three that Hermione stopped. The horrified look on her face, which was even starker now that she'd read this far, became disbelieving when the chapter ended on a cliffhanger at which "Professor Loopin" appeared and raged at the scheming Headmaster's lies, giving Harry and Snape their full support and joining them at the newly-revealed Potter Manor, which was hidden in some kind of pocket dimension that was better-protected than a house under the "Fidelus" Charm, and... and then...

...an Author's Note, declaring that the author was in full support of Harry Potter, the true Hogwarts Champion, DON'T BELIEVE THE FLUFFLEPUFF'S LIES.

Her eyes flitted upward. The author name. FlamingRedBatwings. Flaming Red...

Hermione couldn't take it anymore. Hermione was certain now that she knew _exactly_ who was writing this. The Knut had dropped, and it blew away her horror and incredulity under peals upon peals of uncontrollable giggles and cackles. All of the girls in the fourth-year dorm jolted awake one by one. And she couldn't help it. In the face of their irritation, she showed them.

Ginny Weasley wouldn't live this down until her sixth year, at which point she started actually dating Harry Potter and had learned the difference between the words "loose" and "lose." Mercifully, in all that time, Hermione had taken pity on the poor besotted weeb and neglected to show Harry the story, which she'd had the foresight to save to her laptop's Magical Spinning Drive before Ginny had a chance to purge her fanfic account. It would make good post-graduation blackmail material, Hermione figured. But Ginny didn't have to know she still had it, not just yet...

...

...Also, at the end of the Triwizard Tournament, GPS tracking on Harry's phone lead Dumbledore right to Little Hangleton the moment he was Portkeyed away, and Dumbledore blew Voldemort's miniature substitute body into little, bloody chunks, after which Peter Pettigrew was arrested, and Sirius Black's name cleared. He and his godson, along with a family friend known to the Internet only as "Moony," went on to found the first-ever magical videogaming MagicMotion channel, gathering many fans and at least six hundred insufferable trolls (literal mountain trolls, that is) whining in the comments for every video about whichever one of the three he didn't like as much as the other two. All was well.

Avada Kedavra, The End.

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 **Author's Note:** There's some actual commentary on how stupid fanfiction can get buried in here, but mostly I just wrote this because I'm bored, I can't sleep, and I'm a bit loopy from lack of sleep, so this probably-dumb bit of parody fiction somehow seems funny to me in my currently-befuddled state of mind. It'll probably be embarrassing two hours from now, but oh well: it got me up to my self-imposed daily writing word-count quota, which is always worth a little embarrassment. Huzzah.

Speaking of embarrassing: the discrepancy between the summary pairing and actual pairings in FlamingRedBatwing's little haremfic was unintentional (a result of my insomnia-addled brain forgetting where I was going with the story halfway through it), but I thought it was funny, so I kept it in. I like to think she was planning it to be a dramatic plot twist and decided there was no problem spoiling it in the summary before anyone even read the story in the first place. Imagine an author's note at the end of every chapter teasing that Draco will appear to spice things up... "...soon. : ) "


End file.
